BOOK PRESENTATION: “OXY CASE: LEGAL DEFENSE AND SOVEREIGN DECISION OF THE ECUADORIAN STATE”

The book “Oxy Case: Legal Defense and sovereign Decision of the Ecuadorian State,” published by Ecuador’s Attorney General, was presented on Thursday November 6, at 7:00 pm. The event took place at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute Moot Court Room.

The book was presented by Professor Andrés Jana, an expert in international arbitration, with the participation of the Ecuador’s Attorney General, Dr. Diego Garcia Carrion.

The event hosted lawyers, diplomats, officials, academics, and Ecuadorians living in the area.

The aim of this publication is to provide the public with a historical memory of events and the applicable law, in the form in which the arbitration proceedings were initiated by the oil company, as well as during the period of cancellation, which is expected to happen in the coming months by the Committee of Nullifications assigned by the ICSID Centre.

Attorney General, Diego García Carrión, stressed that the book “is the analysis that will be discussed in the years to come, by lawyers, arbitrators, academics, investors, and state agents, so that an Arbitration Tribunal that is supposed to the apply the law, never exceeds the limits of their competence and decide to embrace its particular idea of justice with the powers it deems appropriate—even at the expense of the local and international law and the rules of free contract signed voluntarily by the parties involved.”

As stated by Professor Brigitte Stern, one of the referees in the process: there was “an excess of power of the sentence to cancel a contract for a company that not only was not a party in the arbitration, but even if it had been, it could not have been considered, since this it is a Chinese investor, and the the Court had no jurisdiction under the US / Ecuador BIT “, expressing in this way, one of the strongest dissenting dictates the history of investor-state arbitrations.